Designing a Designer's Site. The logo

The logo

tarting this kirsanov.com chronicle with the creation of
the logo is not only a tribute to a Design Lab tradition.
Indeed, the whole project grew out of the logo (you can see it right
on the site's splash page); moreover, many of
the site's features, such as its dominant colors, textures, and shapes,
also came from the logo design.

From the very beginning my intention was to create as simple
and generic a logo as possible, without tying it to any particular mission or
activity. In other words, I wanted to create more a logo of myself
than that of my design company. Ideally, the fact that it's
related to design must be conveyed by the logo's graphic quality, not by
any specifically design-related symbol. So, finally I decided for
a logo made of my initials without any extra graphics attached to
them. Of course creating even such a "simple" logo was by no means
a simple process.

The main idea of the logo, other than being "just a
couple of letters," was easy to find. In squeezing the letters together
(which is always the first impulse in working with the text of a logo),
I simply entwined the two opposite serifs of "d" and "k" and was done
with it. Indeed, it is hardly possible to come up with any other
visual motive to be interesting enough yet not distorting the
letterforms too much (which is the most frequent fault in text-only
logos). This modest effect attracts your attention exactly because
you feel that playing with serifs is probably as far as the designer can
go in this case. Additionally, the somehow formal character of
this feature (resembling some well-known geometric paradoxes, such as
the Möbius strip) is a strong contrast to the "warm" humanistic
feel of the font.

The rest of the logo story took much more time and effort, although
the visible outcome of these efforts is more difficult to notice.
It comes to no surprise, since in working with the letterforms, my
intention was not to embellish them, but on the contrary, to make them
as obvious and transparent for perception as possible. I wanted to
bring to perfection the characteristic outlines of the italic letters,
but in such a way that their perfection is only visible to a
thoughtful eye.

As the base of the composition, I used Monotype Garamond typeface
whose italic variety is a rich example of a late humanistic antiqua (my
personal taste, compliant to the humanization trend of the
last decades, mostly dwells in this epoch of the font history, also
taking much delight in modern humanistic sans serifs). However,
for the purposes of a logo this font turned out to be perhaps too tasty.

Fig. 1:
The origins of the logo's letterforms, or Only two letters,
but so much font fun!

The "d" from that typeface (Fig 1, a) was immediately usable, requiring only a
change in slant and some horizontal expansion. I
also lengthened and reshaped its serifs to better accommodate the letter to
clinching with its mate. Much more difficult was producing a good
"k" to match the "d." In Monotype Garamond, this character was way
too whimsical for my logo (Fig 1, c), not to mention that it had
a different slant (in the final logo, both letters are skewed
approximately half-way between the angles of Garamond's "d" and "k").

After some unsuccessful attempts, I had to borrow the
right-side strokes from a Times New Roman "k" (Fig 1, d) and
attach them to the main stem of Garamond's "k." Naturally,
grafting transitional features onto
the classical base required some amount of artificial "humanization" of
the resulting hybrid. As you can see on Fig 1, I had to add some
concaves and rounded corners, change the shape of the serifs, and
generally soften and streamline the borrowed elements.

On the splash page, the "Dmitry Kirsanov Studio" text line does not belong in the
core of the logo proper, although it plays an important aesthetic role
in the composition (besides, of course, its direct informational
function). Since the banner of the company is so small, set in a
sans serif font (this is Frutiger, a fairly
humanized sans serif face), and "slowed down" by the wide spacing
between letters, it makes the "dk" seem, by contrast, larger, more
prominent, and more dynamic.